Contested Urban Spaces

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xvi

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2. Approaching Contested Urban Memoryscapes

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 1-1

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   2. Introduction: Contested Memory in Urban Space

      • Ulrike Capdepón, Sarah Dornhof

      Pages 3-21

   3. (In)visible Monuments. What Makes Monuments Controversial?

      • Aleida Assmann

      Pages 23-44

   4. Australian Welcome Walls and Other Sites of Networked Migrant Memory

      • Alison Atkinson-Phillips

      Pages 45-64

   5. Negotiating Binaries in Curatorial Practice: Modality, Temporality, and Materiality in Cape Town’s Community-led Urban History Museums

      • Stefanie Kappler, Antoinette McKane

      Pages 65-82

   6. Contesting Sensory Memories: Smithfield Market in London

      • Astrid Swenson

      Pages 83-102

3. Decentered Memories

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 103-103

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   2. Across the Atlantic. Silences and Memories of Nazism in Remote Lands (Eldorado, Misiones)

      • Elizabeth Jelin

      Pages 105-124

   3. [De]colonial Memory Practices in Germany’s Public Space

      • Anke Schwarzer

      Pages 125-146

   4. Splinters Between Memory and Globalization: Cosmic Generator Installation by Mika Rottenberg in Münster at Skulptur Projekte 2017

      • Susanne Mersmann

      Pages 147-165

4. Fallen Monuments

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 167-167

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   2. The Empty Pedestal: Artistic Practice and Public Space in Luanda

      • Nadine Siegert

      Pages 169-183

   3. They Took Him Away but It Was Like He Was Still Around: Can New York City Move Beyond the Legacy of J. Marion Sims?

      • Jill Strauss

      Pages 185-203

   4. Disgraced Monuments: Burying and Unearthing Lenin and Lyautey

      • Sarah Dornhof

      Pages 205-225

5. Traces of Violence

   1. Front Matter

      Pages 227-227

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   2. Urban Memory After War: Ruins and Reconstructions in Post-Yugoslav Cities

      • Gruia Bădescu

      Pages 229-252

   3. Monumentality, Forensic Practices, and the Representation of the Dead: The Debate about the Memory of the Post-Civil War Victims in the Almudena Cemetery, Madrid

      • Ulrike Capdepón

      Pages 253-273

   4. The Mass Grave and the Memorial. Notes from Mexico on Memory Work as Contestation of Contemporary Terror

      • Anne Huffschmid

      Pages 275-294

6. Back Matter

   Pages 295-304

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This book takes the urban space as a starting point for thinking about practices, actors, narratives, and imaginations within articulations of memory. The social protests and mobilizations against colonial statues are examples of how past injustice and violence keep on shaping debates in the present. Following an interdisciplinary approach, the contributions to this book focus on the in/visibility and affective power of monuments and traces through political, activist, and artistic contestations in different geographical settings. They show that memories are shaped in contact zones, most often in conflict and within hierarchical social relations. The notion of decentered memory shifts the perspective to relationships between imperial centers and margins, remembrance and erasure, nationalistic tendencies and migration. This plurality of connections emerges around unfinished histories of violence and resistance that are reflected in monuments and traces.

• memory
• city
• urban space
• art
• monuments
• museums
• traces

• Universität Konstanz, Konstanz, Germany

  Ulrike Capdepón

• Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

  Sarah Dornhof

Ulrike Capdepón is a researcher at the Center for Cultural Inquiry, University of Konstanz, Germany, and will be a DAAD-Professor at the CUCSH of the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hamburg, Germany. Her research interests include memory studies and human rights in Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula.



Sarah Dornhof is a research fellow at the Humboldt University Berlin, Germany. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. Her current research examines contemporary art in relation to cultural memory and archival practice in Morocco. Her fields of interest are postcolonial and gender studies.

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